


His Return

by KretinaDivina



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Politics, Creepy, Gen, apologies to julio cortazar and carlos fuentes, once i tried to write something with a plot, quote unquote Original, the setting is a character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2018-12-30 20:15:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12116403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KretinaDivina/pseuds/KretinaDivina
Summary: Patagonia, Argentina, 1977.After the coup of 1976, Jorge Rafael Videla is in power, the first leader of a brutal dictatorship that will last until 1983.  Political opponents and activists are "disappeared" left and right.  It is a time of fear and helplessness.Florencia and Daniel have moved down to Daniel's hometown at the very south of the country, hoping to distance themselves from their Peronist activism at university that would surely attract the dictatorship's attention.  Despite the move, Daniel winds up in prison.  When he's miraculously released after only one month, Florencia hopes for their lives to get back to normal, or as normal as they could possibly be in the freezing, windy, barren city that is her new home.But something won't leave them alone.





	His Return

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written over a short span of time in the fall of 2009. I was researching for my senior thesis which was discussing the rise, fall, and potential (or necessary?) death of Peronism in the 20th and 21st centuries. I wrote this for fun for myself while thinking about all this 24/7 and also stumbling across photos of the  Marjory Glen, a coal ship that caught fire in 1911 down where this story is set and lies stranded on the beach to this day. Something about the boat and some music I was listening to at the time made this all happen.
> 
> I'm not very good at writing plot. You could say I'm terrible at it and you'd be right! I wound up submitting this as my final project for a creative writing class. It was...not really fit for public consumption. My professor hated it. I adored it, but I knew he was right about many of its flaws.
> 
> I've always wanted to fix it up. I have, over the past 8 years, come back to it here and there and changed a few things. I came back to it in earnest a couple weeks ago and have since made some good improvements. 
> 
> At this point I'm kinda just ready to let people see it. There are issues with the pacing, and I can't figure out if the characters are not fleshed out enough or if they're too fleshed out. But...oh well?
> 
> (NB: If you know me well and you See What I Did There, feel free to laugh)

They were silent in his sister’s car.  Alicia had tuned her radio to the only station that didn’t spew propaganda, but the signal blinked in and out.  Static approached and receded like the icy waves of the South Atlantic.

He hadn’t spoken since they’d driven past the guard on the border of the facility.  His eyes had sparkled briefly as he caught a glimpse of the ocean, spitting white foam as it hurled itself against the barren beach outside Punta Loyola.  Then Alicia turned the car onto the winding road back home and he fell silent.

Florencia’s own silence felt more like a presence than an absence.  There was so much she wanted to say, so she filled her mouth with nothing instead.  _You were only locked up for a month but in that month I started feeling it kicking me.  Too strange. This baby clearly belongs to us.  It likes when I sing it the March_.  She had thought the sweater he was wearing as he left the compound was a faded blue, but as clouds moved across the sky and changed the intensity of the beams of light through the car window, she decided it was grey.  _Did you have a grey sweater a month ago_?  She imagined him trading clothes with different political prisoners, trying to find another man built just like a triangle standing on its point.  The sweater was too large, and it smelled a little like someone’s piss.  She rested her hand next to his on the blue cloth seat and felt relieved when he laced his fingers through hers.

After a minute of a song, the radio exploded in static.  Alicia smacked her hand on the steering wheel, cursed loudly, and turned it off.  He finally spoke.

“Did we pass the shipwreck?”  A worry was woven into his tone that Florencia had never heard before.

“This road doesn’t pass it.”  Alicia sounded bored, though Florencia was sure she was anything but.  Maybe Alicia reacted to fear by acting bored.  Florencia had tried to keep herself busy.  While he was locked up for the month the neighbor suggested she take up knitting.  _Me?  I want to buy the stuff, not knit it._ Instead she chain-smoked and took on his unfinished work at their law office, as well as working late into the night on her own.

“Are you sure?”  He was clutching Florencia’s hand tight but he wouldn’t look at her.  She followed his lead and looked not at him but at the gnarled cuff of the sweater.  Either he’d taken up the habit of eating his clothing or the person he’d gotten the sweater from did such things.  She had imagined jails of political dissenters to be full of people like the two of them—young, educated, one eye always on the future—but maybe there were insane people in there too, people who had sacrificed their children in Perón’s memory and gnawed on cloth and lived only in the present. 

“You taught me to drive on this road,” Alicia snapped.  Florencia regarded her with a vague feeling of disgust for the first time in her memory.   “I know everything on it from the estancia to the city.  Florencia, do you have a cigarette?  He’s making me nervous.”

“Goddamnit, Alicia.”  Florencia didn’t like how her voice sounded when it was underused.  “Leave him alone.  Just drive the car so we can get back and he can shower.  He smells awful.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Florencia.”  Alicia swerved to avoid a black and white bird limping across the road, the first sign of life they’d seen since the prison guard.  “Not in my car.  I even tried to find you a radio station free of Videla’s bullshit, that’s how nice I am.”

Florencia was beginning to feel sick from Alicia’s driving.  As they approached the city the potholes only seemed to get worse.  “So you don’t care that your brother just spent the month in prison and you don’t care that I missed him and was worried about him?  Really?”

“We must have missed the boat, Alicia,” he insisted, cutting into the conversation as if the conversation had not existed.  “Turn the car around.”

“We only have ten minutes until home, Daniel.”   

“Alicia, please.”  Florencia ventured a peek at her husband’s face.  He had turned the kind of sickly white people turned when they had a fever.  “I think we missed the boat.”

“Well, take it up with Florencia.  It’s really important to her that you shower.”

“Alicia!”  That name, _Alicia_ , felt like it had slithered out of her mouth like a snake over her teeth, and her stomach churned even more.  “What’s _wrong_ with you today?”

An army truck bumped along the road in the opposite direction.  Alicia, thankfully, gave it room.  “I’m just upset, okay?  We have no idea how long this guy’s going to last in power, or what’s he’s going to do.  His people are—I mean, look, they went into your office and took Daniel away just because of your activism in law school.  You’re lucky they didn’t get _you_ , too _._ You’re lucky they decided to let him go.  What if they come back?”

“And so?  We’re sitting down here like cowards freezing our asses off while our friends are dying.”  Nights this far south dropped below freezing most months of the year; the days sometimes got that way as well. 

“I don’t get you two.”  The sign marking the city limits came into view and Alicia sped up.  “Dying for a cause is not something I understand.  And I still need a cigarette.”

“The boat’s on this road, okay?  Stop.  Alicia, stop the fucking car.”  Finally, some color had returned to his face, splashing like exclamation points over his cheekbones.  “I’ll _walk_ back to Punta Loyola.  I need to see the boat.”

“Okay, okay!  You are crazy enough to want to join your friends in dissenters’ heaven, so I can be crazy enough to take you to see a rusty old boat.”  Alicia turned the car around without checking for oncoming traffic.  Florencia leaned her head against the cold window and sighed, not enjoying the sensation of her hair prickling her forehead like needles, squashed between the glass and her skin. 

“Finally.”

“But Daniel, I’m telling you, the boat’s on a different road.  It’s on Route 40.”

“So take me there, and don’t call Florencia a bitch.  At least she’s married.  You’re still single, huh?”

His hand still in Florencia’s, he and Alicia argued as they headed back down the highway.  Normally Florencia wouldn’t hesitate before leaping into an argument, but she got the feeling that right now they wouldn’t even have heard her.  She stayed there in her own silence instead, looking out the window at nothing worth seeing.  Every pothole they hit replicated itself on her forehead, pressed as it was against the glass, and the jolting of the car seemed to rattle in her skull. 

When the ocean came into view once more, she pulled her head away from the window and noticed the powdery smear that her foundation had left behind.  Thinking of Alicia’s attitude the whole drive back from the prison, she made no move to rub it clean.  She watched the waves roll across the empty bars of sand through the smudge on the window until the rusty hulk of the boat loomed ahead of them.  He took his hand out of hers and flexed his fingers.

“We’re here,” he said.

A boy dressed in a white shirt and ripped denim shorts was scrawling something in white paint along the ship’s hull.  He saw the blue Ford careen onto the sand and began to run, though Florencia couldn’t imagine where he was running to.  There really was nothing around, down so close to the south end of the world.  She watched him run to the dark sand where ocean met beach, splash through the waves and duck under the water.  Perhaps it was a trick of the Patagonian sky, the sun shining flat now through heavy clouds like dawn’s light through blind-slats, but she never did see him come up again.

             

 

Late June arrived and Florencia realized the most prominent colors in her life were hardly colors at all.  The winter winds that seemed to turn everything brown had started to whip through the city.  It was too cold to hose down the sidewalks and too cold for the dead leaves to cling to the branches.   So the leaves fell to the streets and dust from the drying fields that surrounded the city blew in with the western wind.  The power lines on their street collapsed.  Florencia lit candles and saw it in each flame: warm yellow closest to the wick, fuzzy brown around the edge of the pool of light.

There was brown and there was white, the color his face had remained.  After he helped her wash the dishes at night he would sit on the faded floral couch they’d inherited from his mother and watch football for hours.  She moved as many menial tasks as possible out to the living room to be closer to him.  To the sound of cheering crowds and screaming announcers she clipped her toenails, brushed her hair, washed the makeup off her face.

When the games ended he took off the glasses he used to watch TV and rubbed his eyes.  They were brown at the center, white and a little bloodshot around the edges, but even the angry red of the blood vessels in his eyes couldn’t ease the colorless monotony of the winter.  He leaned his head on her shoulder then, nestling around the growing bulk of her abdomen.  Finally they talked, whispering names.  No one would ever dare have such conversations above a whisper.  Matías, his best friend from university, called as often as was practical to tell them what was happening in Buenos Aires.  Three friends who’d studied law with them up north had disappeared in one week, two removed from their homes in the middle of the night, one pulled off the street and into a black car at one in the afternoon.  They had been taken to San Luis, or somewhere far up north…La Rioja?  The conversations with Matías always ended after this.  No one wanted to discuss the unknown.

These whispered conversations were the only time they were close.  In bed at night there seemed to be an invisible wall between them, and Florencia hadn’t been the one to put it up.  She asked, she begged, she asked _extra nicely,_ and still he curled up at the other side of the bed, the distance between him and her now just as great as the one between herself and her warm home up north.  She even tried guilt.  _I slept all alone in this bed for a month and now it’s even emptier,_ she’d said one night.  He told her to try thinking about something other than herself.  This brought frustrated tears to her eyes that she was glad he couldn’t see; wasn’t that what she was doing?  That night she tossed and turned, too cold, then too hot, half wondering if she was causing her own insomnia because the only time he’d let her touch him was when he was asleep.

On one particular Thursday Florencia began the walk home from work with more exhaustion than usual.  The twenty-minute trip had started to feel like forty minutes.  Her brown wool coat with the fur collar no longer closed; she had to wear it open with two sweaters underneath.  The coat flapped as she walked and she felt ungainly and stupid.  The clouded sun hovered low, tense and quiet above this city of no tall buildings.  It would snow soon.

She detoured through the Plaza San Martín to pick up some coffee from the man with the little cart who sat there daily, but he’d packed up and left already.  The blue that remained in the sky was faded and patchy, like a crayon drawing.  The house with the red roof that sat on the southwestern edge of the plaza suddenly looked ridiculous and tacky.  She sighed and kicked a twig with such force it hit the statue of General San Martín in the middle of the plaza.  “Río Gallegos,” she muttered, hating the way the name of the city forced the corners of her mouth to turn up just a bit. 

She heard a sound to her right and turned: there sat a man in jeans, a blue sweater and red knit hat, playing a guitar.  He looked to be in his early 20s, around the same age she was.  _Who plays a guitar in Río Gallegos in June_?  She walked over.  Even stranger than the appearance of the musician was Daniel, sitting next to him on the bench, watching his fingers like they contained all the secrets of the universe.  The scene seemed very intimate.  She wasn’t sure what to say.

“Didn’t feel like coming to work today?” she tried, cutting through the cascade of notes from the guitar.

“Shhhh.  He’s not done.”  Daniel was wearing the political-prisoner sweater again, along with some brown leather gloves and his father’s burgundy scarf.  His hair, normally a nice light brown, hung limp and greasy over his eyes.  She thought it had been a few days since he last kissed her.

“What’s he playing?”

“Something he wrote himself.  Shhhh.”  There was no room for Florencia to sit on the weather-beaten bench.  The wool socks she had put on this morning made her feet too small for her carefully-polished black boots, and she suddenly found it hard to balance on the heels she was determined to wear even while pregnant in this dusty _shithole_ of a city.

“Well, let’s go.  My feet hurt and I need to start dinner.”

Just then the musician, whom she was beginning to hate, opened his mouth and began to sing in the gravelly voice of an old man.

 

            _Little bird, fly far from here._

_This land will bring you only dust._

_Little bird, fly far away._

_We feed our young on salt and rust._

_Salt from the sea, rust from the ships._

_Little bird, fly north, fly west_

_and eat your fill of sun and fruits._

_This land takes babies from the breast_

_and freezes them.  They turn to grey._

_O little bird, fly away, fly away!_

Florencia stood, cold and unable to move, like the statue of General San Martín behind her.  On the bench, Daniel was crying.  First one tear, then two—he wiped them away with a ragged sleeve of the sweater—and then his head was in his hands and he was undoubtedly sobbing, his back undulating like the ocean with the effort.  The man stopped his strumming, put the guitar down, and patted Daniel on the back.

“My God, this is the first time my music’s had such an effect on someone.”  He winked at Florencia, who did not return the wink.  A few snowflakes began to fall.  “You okay, man?”

“My friends are dying, they put me in jail in my hometown…” Daniel said through his hands.  “I want to fight this.  I used to be a fighter.  That’s how we met.”  He pointed at Florencia, but wouldn’t look at her.  “And now I feel like I don’t know how.”

“Then follow your heart, my brother,” the man said.  “What’s it telling you?”

“Excuse me?” Florencia snapped.  “Look, it’s snowing, and I either need to sit down or get home and—”

“Man, you have to either let your woman sit down or go home and cry to her.”  Florencia wanted to punch the musician in his smug mouth.  She imagined how the blood would run from his shiny split lip and into his stubble.  She had never had such a thought in her life, as far as she could remember, but down here anything was possible.  “Don’t let this earth starve you like it starves the birds.  Live.  Survive.  Survive!”  With that, he pulled the end of a loaf of bread from his pocket and tossed it to a pigeon that was pecking at the sidewalk.

“I’m leaving.”  She walked away in disgust, enjoying the feeling of her hair blowing behind her as she walked.  It was the only shade of brown that didn’t look dead in the whole city.  Daniel didn’t follow her.  She turned her head to see him still sitting on the bench, talking to the musician despite the snow rolling in over the city.  The musician was laughing, picking up his guitar and placing it on his lap.  It looked like Daniel was laughing too, now, and the stiff leather of her new gloves didn’t stop her fists from clenching in a nauseating mixture of rage and jealousy.  When was the last time she’d seen him laugh?  The sound of strummed chords followed her home.   

Her hands were slimy from cleaning chicken when Daniel finally walked in the door.  A half-hour had passed since the plaza.

“I’m sorry, Florencia,” he said, leaning against the sink.  He reached into the bowl of salad she’d prepared and pulled out a radish slice.  It crunched between his teeth and she imagined the taste, the taste of sharp, fresh dirt.

“Sorry?”  She flung her hands in the air.  “You just tell all the things that are bothering you to some folk-singer on the street and leave me standing like I’m a stranger?  And these are things you never talk to _me_ about?  And you couldn’t even move over so I could sit down?”

Another radish.  “I didn’t want to get too close to him.”

“That’s bullshit, Daniel.  He was _patting you on the back_.”

He chewed, staring at the floor.  “It’s easier to be weak in front of someone you don’t know, alright?  Any more questions?”

Florencia turned her head away.  She didn’t want to look at him.  The indignant anger that usually made her say things she had to pretend to regret afterwards was bubbling in her chest.  She closed her eyes and tried to breathe like a different Florencia whose life wasn’t _this._

“I’m sorry.  You’re right.  I haven’t been treating you right.”

“You haven’t.”

“Since the prison…I’ve felt fucked-up.  Like I’m not right in the head but I can’t figure out why.”

“Just let me help you.”  Her anger burst and vanished.  She noticed, again, how lifeless and unclean his hair looked.  She moved to take his face in her hands before remembering they were dirty.  “If my hands weren’t covered in—”

He took her by the wrists, ignoring the clammy slime from the chicken skin, and pushed her gently against the oven.  “I’m going to come back to the office.”  He began kissing her cheeks, her lips, and then moved down to her neck.  Her hand searched for the dishtowel that hung on the handle of the oven door.  Now she could put her hands in his hair and lean her head on his while his lips explored places she’d been afraid he’d forgotten.  So what if his hair was unwashed?  _This_ was who she’d married.  “I’m coming back.  Remember me?  I’m Daniel.”

“Daniel,” she whispered as he rolled her plaid skirt up until it gathered around her waist, or what was left of it.  “I remember you, and I was supposed to be making dinner.”

“Shhhh,” he said.  She felt his hands below, heard the yelp of a zipper.  He tugged her wool tights down carefully, yet firmly.  He hadn’t been like that since they’d moved to Río Gallegos.

The phone rang.  Florencia reached behind her and turned on the oven.  The overhead light flickered once, twice, but the power stayed on.  The oven hummed as it began to heat.  The phone didn’t stop.  “Daniel,” she said, pushing his chest lightly with her palms.  “Go get the phone.”

“No,” he said.  “I’m not leaving you.”

“Get the _phone_.  It’s driving me crazy.”

“No.”  He covered her mouth and she bit his palm and when they smirked at each other, everything was suddenly back to normal.  Her elation at this relaxed her enough so that Daniel could easily turn her around and bend her over the countertop.  She was grinning wildly at the wall, victorious.  He had one of his hands gently buried in her hair, stroking her, and was whispering things she could barely hear over the humming of the oven.  She closed her eyes and saw strange, disjointed images as Daniel wrapped his other arm around her hips and began to thrust into her.  _No._ Bare feet in sand, a piece of rusty metal, a hand painting letters in bold white paint—what did they say?

“I’m going to come back,” he whispered.  “I promise.”

“To the office?  You—you better.”  Something was in her head, in her ears.  Waves were roaring, breaking on the sand.  _Like I’m not right in the head but I can’t figure out why._

“I’m going to come back,” he whispered again. He didn’t seem to have heard her.  The phone was ringing again.  She arched her back and pushed her hips against his, hoping to feel something she _wanted_ , but all that was there was the warmth of the oven and the chill of the waves crashing in her head.

 

 

July, and then August.  The phone rang more and more, and then less and less as the callers themselves became the ones who disappeared.  Daniel came to the law office every day, as he said he would, for three weeks.  Suddenly he stopped working again.  He would be asleep when Florencia left to trudge to the office, and when she got home he wasn’t there.  He’d return later in the evening, never saying where he’d gone, but one afternoon Alicia, in one of her acts of obnoxious generosity, took Florencia out for lunch and made a confession.

“I’ve been driving him back out to the boat,” she said, looking intently at the piece of breaded steak on the table in front of her.

“You’re kidding me.”  Florencia dropped her spoon into her vegetable soup.  Liquid the color of dead leaves splattered on her baby-blue sweater, but for once she barely cared.  “He’s been going back to the boat?  Why doesn’t he tell me?  What does he do?  _Why are you taking him?_ ”

“Which do you want me to answer first?”  Alicia lit a cigarette.  The smell of the smoke made Florencia nauseated, and she wrinkled her nose.  “Sorry, I forgot you quit ‘cause you’re knocked up.”

“All of them.  Why doesn’t he tell me?”

“I don’t know.  He doesn’t say.  He didn’t tell me not to tell you, either.  It’s just something he wants to do, like breathing.  Does he tell you every time he breathes?”

“What does he do?”

“He goes over to the boat.  He touches it, looks at it.  He doesn’t wear his jacket.  Imagine standing there in that wind without a jacket.”

“I don’t get it.”

 “Someone put some graffiti there, on the boat.  It says ‘Perón will return.’  He obviously likes looking at that.  I’m sure you would, too.  Maybe you should stop criticizing him and go to the boat with him.”

“I don’t want to go to the boat again.”

“Why not?”

Florencia turned to her soup again, but she suddenly didn’t feel hungry.  In truth, she didn’t have a reason, just a gut feeling that she couldn’t back up with evidence, and that in itself didn’t feel right.  “I don’t like his obsession with it.  You shouldn’t be obsessed with something old and rusty.  It’s wrong.”

“Like your Peronism?”  Alicia giggled and rewarded herself with a piece of steak.

“Alicia!”  Florencia gave up on the soup.  “I thought you agreed with how we felt.”

Alicia seemed to explode.  “In theory, yeah.  The _ideology_ is good.  But like I said when we were driving him back home, I don’t support any cause that leads people to want to die before their time.  Also…maybe _your husband_ is _my only brother_ and I don’t want to lose him.  Did you ever stop to think about that for five seconds?  Instead of bitching about how much you hate Río Gallegos and my…my political views?”

Florencia stared blankly at Alicia for a few moments, and then shook her hair back, pulled her mirror out of her bag and checked her eyeliner.  Spending this much time in such a cold climate must have done something to her mind.  Back at home in Buenos Aires she would have had at least ten different things to say in response, at least nine of them ending in _go fuck yourself,_ but now she wasn’t sure what to say.

Alicia sighed.  “I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have--I do admire your passion.  I guess.  I’m really sorry.”

Florencia granted her a tiny nod.

“Here, I brought you something.”  Alicia reached into her bag and pulled out that day’s _Tiempo Sur_.  “They have lots of coupons in the paper today.  You can save at least 50 percent at the—”

The bottom of the front page caught Florencia’s eye.  “Alicia, look at this.”

Something wet, probably today’s snow, had fallen on the paper and blurred some of the ink, but the headline was still clear: BODY FOUND AT ESTANCIA GAP.  She read further.  The body of a boy around thirteen years old had washed up on a desolate beach some 100 kilometers outside Río Gallegos.  She thought, briefly, of the boy she had seen running into the waves when she had last visited the boat.

Alicia leaned over and read.  “City council approves road repairs?  Sure, it’s pretty outrageous that it’s taken them this long.  I busted my tire two weeks ago on one of those potholes.  I took it to the shop and they still haven’t fixed it.  That’s why I was late today, I had to take the fucking bus from--”

“I’m glad you got that all off your chest, but there isn’t anything about road repairs on the front page.  This thing about the dead boy.”

Alicia squinted **.** The sun bounced its beams off her re-dyed blonde hair **.**   “I don’t see anything about a dead boy.”

“Right here.”  Florencia jabbed at the newspaper with her finger.  “Body found at Estancia Gap.  See?”

“It says ‘City council approves road repairs,’ Florencia.”

Florencia stared at the paper, then at Alicia, who was shaking her head slowly with concern in her eyes.  She stared at the paper again, then back at Alicia.  Body found at Estancia Gap.  It was printed on the front page of the _Tiempo Sur,_ clear as day. The world tilted, and the light shining off Alicia’s hair suddenly seemed to pierce her stomach.  She flung her chair aside and ran to the bathroom, locking the door behind her.  She fell to the floor and, holding her hair back with her right hand, let the vegetable soup and that morning’s toast spill from her mouth and into the toilet as Alicia pounded on the door, calling her name over and over.  _Body found at Estancia Gap_.  It had said it right there in the newspaper in big, bold letters.

Something ran through her mind as she rested her head weakly on the toilet seat.  It was growing in volume, nearly drowning out Alicia’s fists.  _We feed our young on salt and rust.  We feed our young on salt and rust.  We feed our young on salt and rust!_

           

 

September, then October.  Florencia took a bath almost every night.  It felt good to lie there, her skin turning pink in its heat, letting the warmth soak into her swelling ankles and tired back.  It felt even better to lie there, eyes closed, with Daniel sitting on the floor next to her, holding her hand and reading aloud from a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis.  She’d interrupt him and make comments and he’d agree or disagree and it was all relaxing and familiar, even the part where she had a restless child growing inside her.

Except for the seaweed, the seaweed that came out of the faucet every time she ran the water for her bath.  It floated there on the surface when she climbed awkwardly into the tub, surrounding her, but not touching her.  She’d dream about it touching her, sometimes, and when she did she woke up screaming.  He never asked her why.  Then again, there were things she'd learned to stop asking  _him._

So he read aloud to her about Kennedy and Khrushchev and sometimes stopped to tell her _I love you_ or _Things are getting back to the way they were, don’t you think?  I’m feeling better_.  And he’d squeeze her hand and she’d squeeze back, keeping her eyes shut tight until she had a towel wrapped around her and the water had all vanished down the drain.

 

 

A windstorm hit Río Gallegos early in November and knocked the power lines out again, this time for three days.  At 9:00 on the evening the electricity came back on, the phone rang.  Daniel had been better and better lately, choosing to sing to Florencia’s stomach with her instead of watching TV.  He still wouldn’t talk about his trips to the boat, or that month in the facility by the ocean.  Florencia, in turn, had never said anything about the headline Alicia hadn’t seen, or the seaweed in the bathtub.  She preferred not to think about it.  She wondered if their marriage from now on would be full of strange silences.  She tried to remember the boy at the boat, the one who must have drowned.  She had only seen him for a minute, maybe two.  He had been painting something on the boat—what had he been painting? 

“I’ll get the phone,” Daniel said.

“Mmm.”  Florencia dabbed at her cuticles with a tissue, wiping off the excess nail polish.  The baby seemed to realize what kind of world it was about to enter; its incessant kicking had slowed to a lethargic thumping.  Did it really say “Perón will return” on the boat, like Alicia had said?  It had been too long since she’d seen political graffiti anywhere.  She tried to think about something else.  Yesterday Isabela, her sister who lived at the end of the 3,000-kilometer journey north, had called and told her she was crocheting the baby a blanket.  Florencia thought of Isabela as her best friend.  Had she been nearby, everything these past few months would have been different.  But she was over a day’s drive away, and all they could risk talking about over the phone, when they even dared to speak at all, was blankets.

Daniel staggered into the room, as white as he had been a few months ago.  His hands were cupped, holding the air like a banister.

“Daniel, what happened?”  Florencia capped the nail polish and set it on the table.  She hadn’t finished her nails, but the way he looked frightened her.  “Come sit.  What’s wrong?”

He collapsed onto the couch.  “Matías.”  His irises seemed to slump lower in his eyes, imitating his shoulders. 

“What did he say?”

“No, that was Marina.”

“Marina who?”

“Florencia.”  His voice was strained.  “They got Matías.  They knocked down the door of his apartment last night.  She was down the hall at the neighbor’s and heard them.  Their other neighbor, across the hall, heard it too, and was watching through the peephole—And there was a black car parked out on the street.”

Florencia searched for eloquence and couldn’t find any. She had met Daniel at a study session Matías had held in his apartment.  She wrapped her arms around him. 

“I don’t know what to do,” he mumbled.  “Imagine, they took Matías.  I wish it had been me.  I wish they would come back for me and keep me there.  Why wasn’t it me?”

“Don’t say that,” she whispered.  “You don’t want anyone to take you anywhere and keep you there.  _I_ don’t want anyone to take you anywhere and keep you there.”  She kissed him.  His lips were chapped from the wind and the dust.

“It’s not fair.  Who chooses who gets to live and who gets to die?”

Florencia shrugged; philosophical discussions were not where she excelled.  She preferred facts, concrete things that could be fiercely debated and then ultimately proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.  “God?”  She had not been to church since their move. 

“You know I don’t believe in all that.  If God were real, he wouldn’t take someone who was only 27.  Who was trying to do good things…Are you even listening?”

Florencia realized she was chewing on one of her freshly-painted nails.  She slid next to Daniel on the couch and wrapped the plaid blanket they kept there around them.  “Yes,” she said.  “Of course I’m listening.  I always listen to _you.”_

He sighed, shoulders still slumped, and then got up to turn on the TV.  Back to the screaming of the football fans, back to the silence full of noise.

That night she prayed, standing alone in the kitchen while he slept.  She ran through everything she’d memorized when she was young, and then added her own.

_Please keep us safe._

_You should be more specific_ , something in her mind urged.  She didn’t understand why she’d had that impulse, but she listened.

“Please keep him safe,” she whispered.  By the third time she’d said it, she had stopped whispering.

 

 

The next Saturday was one of the best Saturdays she’d spent in Río Gallegos.   Maybe down here where anything could happen, prayer worked.  Rain pounded down on the city all through the morning and mid-afternoon.  He kept the TV off, and though he was clearly thinking about Matías’ disappearance, he kept her close.  Finally, he had stopped wearing the grey sweater, and he looked like the man she had fallen in love with.  He’d even gone back to telling jokes, stupid yet infuriatingly clever, and she realized she’d barely laughed in months.  They drank hot tea and talked about the baby, both sure it was going to be a girl.  She needed a name.   She was due soon, but they’d had too much else to think about.  Victoria would be a good name for her, they decided.  A symbolic name, of course, but a good one.

In the late afternoon the rain stopped and the resulting sunset, a creamy-orange sheen over the waterlogged sky, cleared Florencia’s head.  _I have to go visit the boat_ , came one of her sudden realizations.  _If I figure out what’s so compelling out there at Punta Loyola… maybe this part of our lives can finally be over.  If it’s nice out tomorrow, I’ll go to the boat._

The sunrise woke her up long before she was ready to be awake.  She tried to get back to sleep, but at 6:30 she could no longer keep herself lying still.  Curled around her, he slept, breathing steadily on her bare shoulder blades.  They had forgotten to close the window last night, and the ends of the curtains fanned out in the early-morning breeze.  Everything seemed to be trying to keep her in bed, but she got out and walked in her ungainly way toward the window.

The mirror distracted her: there she was, a nervous cast over her wide brown eyes, her hair unbrushed, her thin shoulders perched awkwardly over her round belly like two different continents.  She wondered what their child would look like.  Behind the curtains, ribbons of sunlight were stretching across the sky. 

Florencia showered and dressed and made herself breakfast.  She drank her coffee with no sugar, and savored the bitterness as the cloudless sky brightened and the street stirred to life.  After she finished, she called Alicia.

“Hello?”  Alicia sounded nervous at the other end of the line.

“Alicia, it’s Florencia.”

“Florencia!”  Relief, and then more concern.  “Why are you calling me so early?  Is he okay?”

“Sure, he’s fine.  I think.  He’s sleeping.  I’m calling about me.  Is there any way—”  She gritted her teeth for a moment.  “Is there any way you could take me to the boat?”

“The boat?”

“The boat at Punta Loyola.”

“Ohhh. Yeah, I think it’s about time you worked that all out.  I can take you to the boat.  How about—I’ll be at your place in a half-hour.  Sound good?”

Florencia washed some dishes, put the kitchen back in order, and re-painted the nail she had chewed on a few days ago.  The blue Ford pulled up outside.  She waved to Alicia through the living-room window and went into the bedroom to find him still asleep, a bit of a smile resting on his face.  She kissed his forehead, taking a moment to appreciate his clean hair.

Sitting in the front seat made the trip out to Punta Loyola less unpleasant, even with the baby—Victoria--back to kicking impatiently.  She kept her eyes focused straight ahead, looking at the brown fields and the mangled pavement, preparing herself for each pothole.  The sky was impossibly wide, wider than it ever could be in the crowded province of Buenos Aires.  She knew people often loved big skies, but she found them disconcerting, endless and beyond comprehension like all the things she couldn’t stand.  Nobody could conquer the vastness of the sky.  Nobody could conquer the enormity of who lived and who died, who came to power and who suffered because of it.  Occasionally, a car passed them, coming from one of the isolated estancias along the coast.  Alicia stayed quiet. 

Florencia felt a pang of disgust when the boat reared up in front of them, the tallest thing for kilometers.  Next to her, Alicia sighed but still, thankfully, didn’t speak.  She drove up onto the sand and turned off the engine.  Florencia opened the door.  Noise rushed forward to meet her: the ocean roaring, gulls shrieking.  It was much colder here, face-to-face with the water, than it had been in Río Gallegos. She pulled on her peach sweater and gloves.

“Coming with me?” she asked.

“In a few minutes.”

Florencia slid out of the car.  Instantly, the wind whipped her hair into her face.  A few strands stuck to her lipstick.  She pushed them away and walked, slowly but resolutely, over to the boat.

Confronting it, the first thing she took in was its size.  She couldn’t even begin to guess how much taller than her it measured.  Next, its smell, sour and metallic and salty like something the sea had rejected.  And finally, there it was, in white letters bigger than any of the names also painted on the side of the boat: PERÓN WILL RETURN!

She whirled her head around, looking for Alicia, but something caught her eye.  A man in a white cap and denim jacket was sitting on a stool in the water, adjusting his fishing pole.  It was strange that she hadn’t seen him before.  She felt a compulsion to find solidarity with someone in front of this rusted hulking _thing._  

“Good morning!” she called over the gulls and the waves, slogging through the wet sand as she walked toward him.  “Do you fish here often?”  She winced inside, thinking of what this was doing to her boots, but kept smiling.

“No.”  The man looked straight ahead.  His skin was a shade similar to Daniel’s hair, and it hung in loose wrinkles on his face like something waterlogged.

“How often are you here?”  Florencia watched him cast the line, surprised he was able to do this in such shallow water.

“When I have to be.”  She couldn’t tell how old he was.  Thirty, forty, fifty?  Older than fifty?

“Sir, I’m sorry to bother you.  But—I live in Río Gallegos, and we had an article in the paper a while ago, in August, about a boy’s body washing up outside Estancia Gap.  Do you know anything about that?”

The man looked straight ahead so intently that she followed his gaze, but nothing lay ahead except for the sky and the point where it met the darker blue of the sea.

“Yes,” he said.  His voice sounded gravelly like the man with the guitar back in the Plaza San Martín.  She had never seen him again, nor had Daniel ever spoken of him after that day.

Florencia waited for him to continue, but he didn’t.  “Well…do you know who he was?” she asked, finally.

“He returned,” was all the man said.

“From _where?_ Who was he?”

“Florencia!  Florencia!”  Alicia was running across the sand.  “Get out of the water!  You’re going to get my car wet.”

Florencia turned to look at Alicia.  “You realize I’m having a conversation?”

Alicia stopped short.  “With yourself?  In your head?”

Florencia turned back to the fisherman, who was still staring into the horizon.  He didn’t seem to notice Alicia’s presence or her rudeness.  “No, with the person sitting next to me.”

“Person…next to you?”  There was a quaver in Alicia’s voice.

Florencia reached out and touched the fisherman’s shoulder, feeling his denim jacket under her hand.  “This one, right here.  He certainly _feels_ real,” she added, hoping he wouldn’t mind.

Alicia was beginning to look the same shade of pale as her brother often did.  “Florencia, look at me.”

“I’m looking at you.”

“ _There isn’t anyone there_.”

She looked to her side—the fisherman still sat there.  “No?  Then who was I talking to?”

A gull screeched overhead and dove for something in the water, making it hard for Florencia to hear Alicia’s quiet words.  “You weren’t talking.  You weren’t moving your mouth at all.”

“I wasn’t?”

“Do you think people go crazy when they’re pregnant?  Remember when—with the article in the newspaper?” 

Florencia turned once more to the fisherman.  He was gone—stool, fishing rod, everything.  There were no footprints in the sand except for hers and Alicia’s, and no car sat by the skeletal boat but their own.  An enormous wave crashed onto the sand, soaking Florencia’s pants up to her knees.  The wave had wrapped something around her feet, and as the water receded, she looked down and screamed.  The seagulls screamed back.  A ragged white shirt and a pair of denim shorts bobbed around her ankles.  Underneath them floated a can of spray paint, white spray paint.  White shirt, denim shorts, white paint.

“Alicia, we have to get back.  We have to go back home now.  Come on, let’s go.  Alicia.” 

“Is it the baby?”

Florencia looked down again.   A hand, as water-swollen as the fisherman’s skin or maybe a drowned person’s, was reaching out of the water, grasping at the can of spray paint.  It missed the can and clung to the toe of her boot instead. She yelped and gave its wrist a good, hard kick with her other foot, but it held on.  She felt its bony fingers through the leather, clutching at her.  She looked up past Alicia and to the boat.  PERÓN WILL RETURN!

“Alicia, there’s something in the water—don’t you see—"

Alicia just stood there, her eyes and mouth wide open.  She wasn’t seeing.

“Alicia!”

The fingers were moving, crawling up her foot and she knew that if the _thing_ grabbed her by the ankle her life would end here at Punta Loyola, the last place she’d ever want her life to end.  It would drag her down, down, deep into the crashing freezing ocean, and she’d wash up somewhere months later, a sad story on the evening news or maybe just a headline on the front page no one would be able to see.  She screamed through the wind, the gusts whipping her hair into her mouth, and kicked the wrist again.  It let go.  Much too easily, she thought.  Because--

_It doesn’t want me._

She didn’t think she was capable of running, as pregnant as she was, but today she ran, flinging herself into the car, slamming the door behind her.  Alicia was still standing on the beach like an idiot.  She leaned on the horn, hitting it over and over, sandy water smearing over the blue cloth seats and her hair falling into her eyes.

When Alicia climbed into the car she looked terrified, and drove away from the boat and Punta Loyola far faster than the posted speed limit.  “I don’t understand, Florencia,” she said, finally.  “What did you see?  What happened?”

“We have to get home,” Florencia said.  It was all she could think of over the noise in her head.  _Salt and rust.  Salt from the sea, salt from the ships.  It freezes them.  They turn to grey._ Her stomach was twisting from fear.

“I think I should drive you to the hospital,” Alicia said, her voice trembling.  “You were screaming and there was nothing…”

“No, no, no.   _No._ It’s not me.  I’m fine.  We have to get home.”   Down the road once again came the fields, the potholes and the infinite sky.  _We have to get home.  We shouldn’t have left him.  Damn it, Alicia, drive faster!_

 

 

Florencia’s hands shook so much that Alicia had to unlock the door for her.  Inside everything was quiet.  The clock ticked on the kitchen wall.  The phone wasn’t ringing and the TV wasn’t on.  He had rinsed out the coffee pot and left it in the sink.  The water was running in the bathroom.

“You should drink something,” Alicia called from the living room.  “You don’t look so good.”

“Maybe.”  The sound of feet moving through liquid met her ears as she walked to the refrigerator.  _I need to stop thinking about the fisherman.  The boy.  The boat.  The things in the water, I need to stop thinking about water._ She realized the water was not just in her imagination.  She was actually feeling her feet moving through it.  She looked down.  Water was all over the floor. 

Alicia came in.  “What kind of juice do you have?  Is something leaking?”

“Huh.  I don’t know.”  Florencia left the kitchen.  Water was running down the hall, gleaming on the wood floor.  She flung open the bathroom door.

“A-Alicia?” she squeaked, though Alicia surely couldn’t hear her over the sound of water cascading from the faucet and into the bathtub and overflowing onto the floor and around her feet and out into the rest of the house.  Daniel hung over the side of the tub, his back to the ceiling, his arms and head submerged.  She shook him.  He didn’t move.  She shook him again.  He still didn’t move.  She realized she was not touching fabric, but skin.  She took a step backwards.

His shirt was rolled up around his shoulders.  In handwriting that wasn’t his, the words were painted in white across his back:

PERÓN

WILL

RETURN!

 

Over the sound of the water and her heartbeat thumping wildly in her ears, she heard Alicia’s tiny voice.  “Florencia.  There’s a weird note on the table.  It says all kinds of crazy things, and tells you _He has returned!  Don’t give up_ —It sounds like a crazy person wrote it--”  The voice cut off.  “Oh, my God.  He—what’s—”

Florencia found herself on the floor, slumped against the wall, her clothes so full of water she felt the dampness in her bones.  The water carried glistening seaweed with it as it rushed over her feet.  She knew Alicia wouldn’t be able to see it.  Alicia never understood.  Never saw.

The twisting she’d felt in her stomach in the car had turned into a dull pain, spreading through her abdomen.  She welcomed the feeling.  It was real.  It was the only thing that was real.

“Wh-who wrote that on him?  Florencia?  What does it mean?”

The water pouring from the faucet was as loud as the ocean.  She was sure she could taste salt in her mouth.   

“That’s not his handwriting, Florencia.  _What does it mean?”_

The white shirt, the blue shorts, the white paint.  Blue and white, too much blue and white.  There in front of her drooped Daniel, his white paint and jeans, drowned in the bathtub.  No one committed suicide like that.

She closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears and thought of the brown, the brown of Río Gallegos.

 

 

Their son, born a few days early, arrived four minutes before midnight that night in the Regional Hospital.  His hair was darker than Florencia’s, almost black, and he had the brown eyes his parents shared.  They hadn’t had a boy’s name ready.  She named him Domingo.  After all, he was born on a Sunday, and it had been Perón’s middle name.  Domingo seemed a fitting name for this child, her first child, their only child. 

Suicides happened often in Río Gallegos, the paramedic with sympathy in his eyes had said.  People just couldn’t take the cold and the wide and the empty.  Florencia had shaken her head imperceptibly at the trembling Alicia, willing her not to say anything, remembering the writing that had not been Daniel’s.  Thinking of the dangers of such a message, she had managed to wipe the paint off Daniel’s back before the ambulance arrived to take them both away.  PERÓN WILL RETURN!

Perón had been dead for two years; at least, that’s what the newspapers said.  Perhaps one day he would return.  She no longer understood the border between, or the meaning of, life and death, and no longer cared to understand.  Perhaps one day everyone they had lost would return.  Perón would return and until then, she and Domingo would stay.  They would stay in Río Gallegos, stay in the place of Daniel’s beginning and his end, where the wind blew brown over the flat streets and howled until it met the ice-blue crash of the South Atlantic.

 


End file.
